Birthday Box

I love making cake for my friends, especially for a birthday. I made the vanilla hummingbird cupcake recipe with half vanilla frosting and half nutella frosting and of course used sprinkles for a birthday. I sometimes find it tricky giving people lots of cakes because of them having to return tupperware or tins. This cardboard box was perfect and made them look neat and professional.

Retro Gingerbread Men

I'm aware that it's not even nearly christmas, and how overly inappropriate gingerbread men are considering the hot weather we seem to be having. But, I've been wanting to make these for a while. Well since my Granny heard about my baking and gave me a bag of her cutters. My instant favourite was this gingerbread man one, which she used to use to make my Dad cookies when he was little. I used this recipe which produced soft gingerbread. I love that they have funny little faces with a kind of cheeky look, it must be the eyebrows!

Chocolate Cupcakes with Nutella Frosting

Assuming that most people like chocolate I made these chocolate cupcakes for my sister's office. They are Hummingbird recipe chocolate cupcakes topped with Nutella Frosting. I am a huge Nutella fan and it's often eaten straight out of the tub with my housemates at university, but in frosting form it's even better.

Happy Birthday Grandy

My Grandmother ('Grandy') works hard all year cooking us amazing food. And even though her cakes are amazing, you really can't make your own birthday cake. So I set about making her something special using white and yellow which is a colour combination I associate with her. I strangely have never made a Victoria Sponge cake and insist on going around trying different ones, but always find them quite dry. Therefore in this one I used seedless raspberry jam and fresh raspberries and used the Hummingbird Frosting as the buttercream. I had no choice but to use natural icing sugar so that's why the buttercream is a bit of a funny colour but it tastes the same. She thought the cake was great and I'm glad that I could do something nice for her.

Carrot Cake

I had a request for Carrot Cake, I'd never made it before and not really eaten a massive amount of it either. I can safely say that I am now a fan. It has just enough cinnamon and ginger and I used this Hummingbird Bakery recipe as I find their recipes stay moist the longest and always turn out pretty right. I excluded the walnuts as my friend is allergic and I'm not that keen either, and it doesn't feel like it's lacking them. Think they would also be great in cupcake form.

Blueberry Cake

If you had asked me to eat a blueberry a year ago I probably would have refused, but now I'm obsessed. I've even recently bought a blueberry plant! So when wanting to make something new I chose his cake recipe from the Hummingbird book, which can be found here. The cake wasn't too sweet and was balanced out nicely with the sugary cream cheese frosting.